Who was the secret
financier who funded Freeman’s multi-million dollar legal defense?

Why didn’t Freeman
rat out the higher-up SEIU officials -- including Andy
Stern and Eliseo Medina -- who were implicated in the crimes for
which Freeman was convicted?

Before Tasty offers
up the source’s answers, here’s some quick background:

After Freeman was
indicted, a team of million-dollar attorneys from Mayer Brown LLP -- a global
law firm with offices in New York, DC, London, Paris, Beijing, Dubai,
Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, etc -- parachuted into California to defend him.

They included Kelly Kramer,
a partner at Mayer Brown LLP who leads the firm’s “White Collar Defense and Compliance Team” and has personally defended former members of the US Congress.
According to Super Lawyers, he’s one
of the top white-collar defense lawyers in DC.

Kelly Kramer, Mayer Brown LLP

After Freeman was
convicted, Mayer Brown LLP filed
an appeal with the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and
parachuted two more attorneys from the East Coast to try to get Freeman out of
jail.

They included Dan Himmelfarb, a
partner in the firm’s DC offices, who specializes in appeals and has “filed
more than 200 merits and petition-stage briefs in the US Supreme Court and has
argued… 12 cases in the US Supreme Court...,” according to the firm's website. Before
joining the firm, Himmelfarb was an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District
of New York and an Assistant to the US Solicitor General.

In other words, these
guys charge beaucoup bucks -- likely $2,000-$3,000 an hour.

Who paid for these
attorneys?

It sure wasn’t
Freeman.

After all, when
Freeman's wife appeared in court during Freeman's criminal trial, she was
assigned a Public Defender because she couldn’t afford a private attorney.

So who paid Freeman’s
legal bills?

Dan Himmelfarb, Mayer Brown LLP

Here’s what Tasty’s
source says:

When Freeman was
first indicted on multiple criminal charges, a clutch of nervous SEIU officials met with him to discuss his options.

Option #1: Freeman
could try to beat the rap by pointing the finger at the higher-up SEIU
officials who were apparently complicit in the crimes.

‘But don’t do that,’
argued the SEIU officials. ‘We’ll offer you a better option: SEIU will hire you the
best attorneys in the whole damn country and we guarantee you’ll never see a
day of jail time. But you can't implicate any of us.’

Of course, we all
know that Freeman chose Option #2. And that’s why, during the trial, he never ratted
out the SEIU higher-ups who, after all, were paying for his lawyers.

In the end, SEIU
officials didn’t come through with their end of the deal -- their fancy
attorneys didn’t keep Freeman out of jail.

Freeman has
gotta feel burnt by his SEIU handlers, right?

Which leads Tasty to
wonder whether SEIU officials might now be slipping him some hush money, given that
Freeman has stayed silent even after getting out of jail.

Although Tasty’s source
has provided answers to some of the long-standing mysteries, others remain unanswered:

Andy Stern, SEIU

How much money did
SEIU officials pay for Freeman’s defense and appeal?

After the Los Angeles Times outed Freeman's corruption scandal, SEIU officials publicly condemned Freeman for stealing from low-paid SEIU members. Why did SEIU officials turn around and secretly fund his criminal defense for crimes committed againstSEIU'sownmembers? Isn't this proof that SEIU higher-ups are implicated in Freeman's crimes? After all, why else would they have funded his defense against stealing money from SEIU members?

Who authorized SEIU's payments to Freeman's attorneys? What role did Andy Stern, Anna Burger and Mary Kay Henry play?

Starla Rollins, a former Ward Clerk
at a Dignity Health’s Community Hospital of San Bernardino for over 20
years.

She alleges that
Dignity illegally fired her in 2012, and that SEIU-UHW (her union) sat on its
hands and refused to help her as Dignity pushed her out the door.

Since filing her suit
in 2013, Rollins has fought her way through a series of appeals filed by both SEIU-UHW and
Dignity. Last October, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
California ruled
in Starla’s favor and ordered SEIU-UHW and Dignity Health officials to stand
trial over their alleged violations that cost Starla her job of 20+ years.

The three-judge panel ruled:

“We conclude that…
the Hospital has breached the Seniority Agreement and the CBA, and that triable
issues of fact exist as to whether the Union breached its duty of fair
representation.”

In their ruling, the
judges slammed Marcus
Hatcher, who then served as SEIU-UHW’s so-called “Director of
Representational Excellence.” Later, SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan appointed
Hatcher as the director of the union’s Kaiser Division.

Starla Rollins

As far as the
upcoming trial, it looks like SEIU-UHW and its hack attorney Bruce
Harland are running scared.

In recent weeks,
SEIU-UHW’s attorneys twice requested lengthy delays in the start date of
the trial. Harland proposed postponing the start date from October 17, 2017 until
January 2018.

The judge’s response?

“DENIED.”

Check out the judge’s
handwritten response on SEIU-UHW’s request, which Tasty has posted
below.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

The “partnership”
unions are beginning to prepare for next year’s negotiations with Kaiser
Permanente… which means it’s time for more “instant recesses,” dance-offs,
“Contract
Buddy,” Team Salad Days, and Zumba.

However, in an
interesting new development, Tasty’s sources also report growing tensions
between various partnership unions.

Here’s what Tasty
knows.

Two weekends ago
(August 25-27), the partnership unions -- the “Coalition of Kaiser
Permanente Unions” -- held a three-day conference at the Hilton Portland
and Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon.

Kaiser CEO Bernard
Tyson spoke to the conference, which also included multiple “Thrive activities,”
Zumba, and “Instant Recesses” to the music of Michael Jackson and Bruno Mars.

Other items on the
agenda?

"Reflections on
20 Years of Partnering" and workshops including "The Road to Workplace
Wellness," "Projecting Confidence and Credibility," "BMI Boot
Camp: Become a Trail Blazer for Health," and "Tag – You’re It."

Friday, September 1, 2017

The latest suit was
filed August 9 by SEIU Nevada’s former president,Cherie Mancini, who was removed
from her position by SEIU President Mary Kay Henry earlier this year. A union
steward from Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican Hospital is a co-plaintiff in
the case.

The lawsuit names SEIU,
Mary Kay Henry and Luisa Blue as defendants.

“This is a power grab
by the international (union),” Mancini’s lawyer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal
(“Former
SEIU president sues to get her job back,” August 25, 2017). “SEIU comes in
and imposes a trusteeship and puts in place the government they want,” Luisa
Blue, appointed by Henry as the “trustee” of SEIU Nevada, dismissed the claims
in the lawsuit.

Mancini’s attorneys
have asked the judge for a temporary restraining order and preliminary
injunction against SEIU, according to court records.

Here’s an excerpt
from the lawsuit, which summarizes the violations that SEIU allegedly committed.
A full copy of the lawsuit is below.

After the emergency trusteeship was imposed by SEIU on Local 1107,
Defendants breached the SEIU Constitution in the following ways: Defendants
failed to hold a trusteeship hearing within thirty (30) days of imposition of
the emergency trusteeship; failed to notice the membership, including Plaintiff
Frederick Gustafson, in a timely fashion regarding the trusteeship hearing;
failed to properly notice the Local 1107 membership once the emergency
trusteeship hearing was set; failed to issue a decision regarding the merits of
the trusteeship within sixty (60) days; denied Local 1107 due process via a
full and fair hearing on the merits of the emergency trusteeship; failed to
establish a sufficient good faith emergency basis for the imposition of the emergency
trusteeship; failed to address good cause for not adhering to the reasonable
time periods for these procedures; and failed to address the legitimacy and
necessity of continuing the trusteeship at the trusteeship hearing held on July
13, 2017, seventy six (76) days after the emergency trusteeship was imposed.

SEIU and Mary Kay
Henry are represented by Glenn
Rothner (Rothner, Segall, Greenstone and Leheny), a Los Angeles
attorney who specializes in imposing trusteeships on local unions.

One year ago, the
same group of workers declined to join SEIU-UHW. Earlier this week, however, they voted
by a margin of 78 (NUHW) to 12 (No Union) to join NUHW in an NLRB election. SEIU-UHW
did not try to put its name on the ballot.

Dignity Health is one
of California’s largest hospital chains and operates more than 30 hospitals
across the state. Since 2009, SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan has repeatedly made backroom
deals with Dignity’s execs to slash
SEIU-UHW members’ pensions and health insurance, and impose
wage freezes on thousand workers… even as Dignity was pocketing big profits.

Earlier this month, a
second group of workers in Santa Cruz, Calif. also voted to join NUHW. They’re
employed by an addiction treatment center that includes Treatment Technicians,
Intake Referral Specialists, Medical Assessment Specialists, Custodians, Receptionists,
Office Assistants and Dietary Staff. The unit of 55 workers at Janus of
Santa Cruz voted to join NUHW by a margin of 35 (NUHW), 2 (No Union), and 2
(Voided Ballots).

SEIU’s Maine State
Employees Association (SEIU Local 1989) represents 13,000 largely public-sector
workers, including more than 9,000 state workers.

Since 2011, Maine
Gov. Paul LePage has repeatedly tried -- and failed -- to pass “right-to-work-for-less”
legislation in the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. These bills would
have eliminated the requirement that state employees who choose not to join a
union instead pay a fee to help cover the costs of the union’s collective
bargaining and representation services that benefit them. These cost-sharing
fees are called “agency fees.”

Gov. LePage -- who has
made racist
comments and said this week that taking
down Confederate statues is equivalent to taking down 9/11 memorials --
called his failure to implement “right-to-work-for-less” laws in Maine as one
of his greatest failures as a governor.

Well, Republican
lawmakers may have rejected LePage’s anti-union efforts. But that didn’t stop
SEIU from accepting the same deal during SEIU’s recent contract negotiations
with LePage’s office.

If SEIU officials had rejected the “right-to-work-for-less” provision,
SEIU members would have received 1% pay increases during each of the next two
years.

According to the Bangor Daily News, AFSCME -- which also
represents some state employees -- rejected a similar deal from LePage’s administration. An AFSCME representative told the newspaper that: “Right
to work is designed to cripple unions and take them out of the game.”

How will SEIU’s
horrible deal affect workers? Here’s what one reader said in comments posted
below the news article:

The union leaders just killed the union for 3%
a year for two years. The union will now die of suicide.

Friday, August 11, 2017

SEIU-UHW’s Dave
Regan has returned to his ballot-initiative habit once again.

This week, Regan
announced two ballot initiatives targeting the kidney dialysis industry in
California, where he’s trying to squeeze some kinda deal out of one of the
state’s the largest dialysis companies, DaVita Inc.

The two measures --
tentatively titled the “Kidney Dialysis Patient Protection Act” and the “Fair
Pricing for Dialysis Act” -- must be approved by the California Attorney
General before Regan can begin collecting signatures from more than 700,000
California voters to qualify the initiatives for the statewide ballot in
November 2018.

Regan has been super
un-successful at using ballot initiatives to ink sweetheart deals with hospital
CEOs in both California and Arizona. Tasty estimates he’s spent more than $25
million of union members’ dues money on his failed ballot initiatives... and hasn't produced a single organizing victory.

Now… he appears to be
turning his ballot-initiative phaser on the kidney dialysis industry.

What’s going on?

Since 2016, Regan has
been attempting to organize DaVita workers at kidney dialysis clinics. But he’s
been unsuccessful. So he’s now trying his ballot-initiative thang to see if
DaVita’s CEO might be open to giving him a special deal... at a really good price!

Of course, that’s the
problem with Regan. Once he disappears into a hotel suite with the CEOs, workers
will never get to know what kind of deal he makes with his pin-striped pals.

In 2014, he
negotiated a secret deal with the California Hospital Association…
which Regan then refused to show to the union’s Executive Board, let alone the
rank-and-file workers.

Two years later, a copy of the deal became
public as a result of a lawsuit. It turned out that when Regan was alone
with the bosses in the hotel suite, he agreed to ban SEIU-UHW members from
striking, force workers into pre-negotiated contracts with substandard wages
and benefits, and gag union members from filing patient-care complaints against
hospitals or even criticizing their CEO’s gold-plated salaries.

So the kidney
dialysis workers need to beware. If Wall Street Dave actually succeeds in
getting a meeting with DaVita’s CEO, workers better be damned sure they force themselves into the meeting.

Other things to
watch:

Will the kidney
dialysis industry attempt to enforce a California law that makes
it illegal to use ballot initiatives as a bargaining chip?

Will Regan
raid SEIU-UHW members' strike fund for the millions of dollars it will cost to pay
signature-gatherers to collect the more than 700,000 signatures for the two kidney dialysis ballot measures?

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